If if is Friday, that means New York Times columnist David Brooks is hammering conservatives on the PBS NewsHour. On Friday, he condemned Grover Norquist and the entire no-new-taxes contingent as "completely wrong" in the current budget battle:
JIM LEHRER: David, how do you see the Republican divide on taxes?
DAVID BROOKS: Tom Coburn is completely right, and Grover Norquist is completely wrong.
If you're going to have a deal, there's going to have to be revenue as part of it. It doesn't mean you have to raise rates, but it does mean you have to raise revenue by closing loopholes. And the loopholes that they're now talking about as part of the budget deal are technical things about closing loopholes on corporate taxes for a plane and things like that.
They're not raising rates. They are not anything that's going to hurt growth. And so, if you're going to do a deal, if you're going to cut the size of government, which will be part of the deal, you have to raise revenue. And Grover is wrong on the economics. He's wrong factually.
He said that only Coburn really wants to raise revenues. I have had several Republican senators say to me, hey, I signed Grover's pledge, but as part of this deal, I know we need to raise rates, and I'm going to go back on it.
And it would be good for the country. It would be bad for Grover's interest group, but it would -- it's absolutely -- Coburn is absolutely right.
JIM LEHRER: What about the Republican Party? Would it be bad for the Republican Party?
MARK SHIELDS: No, I mean, I was thinking as we watched that piece with Judy...
JIM LEHRER: Yes.
MARK SHIELDS: ... Vin Weber represents the district -- I mean, was reasonable and thoughtful, it struck me, and reflective, and very problem-solving. That district is now represented by Michele Bachmann. So...
JIM LEHRER: In Minnesota, right, yes.
MARK SHIELDS: It tells you something about how Minnesota Republicans may have changed in that time.
Correction, please! Shields mangled the facts on Minnesota’s congressional districts. Bachmann represents the Sixth District, which is largely suburban and exurban counties north of Minneapolis and St. Paul, going up to St. Cloud. While Weber was elected to the Sixth District in 1980, he represented the Second District for most of his career in the 1980s – which was then based in the southwest corner of Minnesota.
At least Brooks found Obama's new Afghanistan policy incoherent:
JIM LEHRER: But it was labeled a compromise between those who wanted a -- the Democrat -- the more Democrats -- the Democrats who wanted it quicker and bigger, the withdrawal, and then those who wanted no -- little or no withdrawal, which is what the military...
DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Well, sometimes compromises are coherent, and sometimes they're incoherent.
And I think this is on the incoherent side. If you really want to go with the drone, what Biden wants, then you shrink down to a pretty small force and you send out a lot of drones. If you want to go with what Petraeus wants, a complete counterinsurgency, you go with the surge.
And he's stuck in the middle there with 70,000 troops, which is too much for Biden, too little for Petraeus. So, I'm not sure what it's about. Are we trying to just create what they call fortress Kabul, where we just protect Kabul over the long term, and the rest of the country does what it can, or are we trying to protect the whole country? I'm not quite sure what the answer to that is.
